o forget myself and my sorrows in a poet's immortal creations. But I
have left Keats behind me. He was with me in the sunshine,--he does not
follow me into the shade."

A cloud of melancholy darkened his worn features, and he slowly closed
the book. He felt that it was from henceforth a sealed letter. For him
the half-sad, half-scornful musings of Omar Khayyam were more fitting,
such as the lines that run thus:--

"Fair wheel of heaven, silvered with many a star,
Whose sickly arrows strike us from afar,
Never a purpose to my soul was dear,
But heaven crashed down my little dream to mar.

Never a bird within my sad heart sings
But heaven a flaming stone of thunder flings;
O valiant wheel! O most courageous heaven,
To leave me lonely with the broken wings!"

tinging pain, as of tears that rose but would not fall, troubled his
eyes. He passed his hand across them, and leaned back against the sturdy
trunk of the elm which served him for the moment as a protecting haven
of rest. The gentle murmur of the bees among the clover, the soft
subdued twittering of the birds, and the laughing ripple of the little
stream hard by, all combined to make one sweet monotone of sound which
lulled his senses to a drowsiness that gradually deepened into slumber.
He made a pathetic figure enough, lying fast asleep there among the
wilderness of green,--a frail and apparently very poor old man, adrift
and homeless, without a friend in the world. The sun sank, and a crimson
after-glow spread across the horizon from west to east, the rich colours
flung up from the centre of the golden orb merging by slow degrees into
that pure pearl-grey which marks the long and lovely summer twilight of
English skies. The air was very still, not so much as the rumble of a
distant cart wheel disturbing the silence. Presently, however, the slow
shuffle of hesitating footsteps sounded through the muffling thickness
of the dust, and a man made his appearance on the top of the little
rising where the lane climbed up into a curve of wild-rose hedge and
honeysuckle which almost hid the actual road from view. He was not a
prepossessing object in the landscape; short and squat, unkempt and
dirty, and clad in rough garments which were almost past hanging
together, he looked about as uncouth and ugly a customer as one might
expect to meet anywhere on a lonely road at nightfall. He carried a
large basket on his back, seemingly full of wee